Many athletic endeavors pit man against the clock. In order to monitor timed performance particularly for training purposes it is frequently desirable to have a large wall-mounted clock which can be readily seen at great distances and accurately keeps time in at most one second intervals. It is not uncommon for such clocks to have diameters or widths of three or more feet. Of course the length and mass of the clock's second hand has to be commensurate with these dimensions. As a consequence, large quantities of power are necessary to move the hand, and its linkage and support assemblies. Unfortunately, these clocks must frequently be utilized under conditions which do not permit access to conventional electrical power outlets, requiring that they contain independent power supplies such as batteries. These limited power supplies are severely overdrained by the size of the hands resulting in extremely short periods of useful operation before replacement of the power source is necessitated.
Attempts have been made to reduce the weight of the hands such as by constructing them of balsa wood or by utilizing hands of very short length. However, hands made from balsa wood are extremely fragile and almost inevitably break under the various stresses induced during shipment or in the athletic environment. Hands of relatively short length are difficult to read accurately from a distance.
Other difficulties have arisen in an effort to produce time clocks that are more accurate. Essentially all accurate, battery-driven clock drive mechanisms or movements presently commercially available provide drive shafts for hands that are to indicate second intervals which rotate in high discrete intervals, generally of one-half or whole second periods. A large hand, rigidly connected to the drive shaft, cannot be accelerated and decelerated as suddenly and rapidly as is necessary, resulting in continual substantial mechanical overshoot (or "wobble") in the hand, which, over a time period, tends to produce mechanical difficulties in the clock drive mechanism.